New US President Donald Trump has already initiated a number of good things. He has put a real stopper on the damaging entitlement and woke culture that has enveloped the West and stirred things up in a positive way in the Middle East.

Unfortunately, his support from democracies has not extended past Israel. 

Now, I have on several occasions called for the Western Europeans to pull their weight militarily and commented on how successive UK governments have virtually destroyed the once formidable British armed forces (especially David Cameron in 2010) and how the only Western nation in Europe really doing its bit in terms of defence spending is Poland.

Trump is right to criticise and threaten these countries who have bludged off the US for years. The chickens are coming home to roost. However, he should also support Ukraine, which is fighting the West’s battle with Ukrainian blood to counter Russian imperialism.

There is no justification for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian Paranoia is no excuse. Europe is weak and no threat to Russia. 

Trump is also meant to be a great negotiator, but by conceding all his bargaining chip at the start, he puts Ukraine in a dreadful position. Interestingly, he did the same thing with the Taliban in Afghanistan and look what happened there.

I have always been amazed at how weak the Western powers, particularly Britain and France, were at Munich in 1938 when they capitulated to Hitler. It also surprised me that the poor Czechoslovakians, having been sold down the river, went along with it and surrendered the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany without a fight. Hitler’s generals did not believe they had the capability to successfully invade the heavily wooded Sudetenland, so regardless of the Western powers’ craven cowardice, the Czechs should have gone it alone. As it turned out, the German army was waiting to remove Hitler but were thwarted by Chamberlain’s appeasement.

History tells us that, sadly, you can never fully trust your allies to protect you. Ukraine should never have given up the 1,000 or so nuclear weapons it inherited after the Soviet Union fell in 1994. If it still had them, Putin would never have invaded in 2022. Dictators respect strength.

Ukraine doesn’t have to go along with what Trump and Putin come up with. Ukraine must be involved and be comfortable with whatever deal is arrived at. If not, it can fight on and try to shame its Western European allies into helping it in whatever way they can. Despite the Western Europeans current military weakness, by showing a bit of backbone and by realising that rather than wasting money on bloated, unnecessary welfare schemes (which at the end of the day are worthless if you can’t defend yourselves) and by spending that money on urgent rearmament instead, Ukraine may still prevail, despite the USA. However, it would be far better still if all Western democracies, including the US, fully support the brave Ukrainian people who are fighting and dying for our democratic way of life and if Trump muscled up to his mate Putin and put pressure on him to seek a true peace rather than appeasing him. The world will be a far safer place if that occurred.